The remark was often made among us that the Dead Letter Office afforded the very best opportunities for making collections of autographs of celebrated people--only the authorities could not be made to see it in that light. It was always with a sigh of regret, I must confess, that letters signed by such names as Bancroft, Whittier, Beecher, Grant, Greeley, were returned to their rightful owners. The most interesting accounts of foreign travel were sometimes contained in the dead letters--accounts more interesting than any book ever published. These were, as a general thing, written by ladies--and that sealed their doom. Gentlemen writing letters almost always sign their full name; but a lady will write a dozen pages, telling her friends all about the Louvre and the Tuileries, the Escurial and London Tower, in one long letter, and then sign Kate, or Lillie, at the end, thus precluding all possibility of having her letter returned, though we know from it that she has returned to her home in Boston. It is almost incredible what a large number of letters passing through our hands are "finished off" by that classically beautiful verse--"My pen is bad, my ink is pale; my love for you will never fail"--and it is impossible to believe in how many different ways and styles these touching lines can be written and spelled, till you find them dished up to you a dozen times a day, in this office. Eastern people don't appreciate this "pome" as Western farmers do. Missouri rustics are particularly addicted to it. What the predilection of the Southern people might have been, I cannot say; it was just after the close of the war, and their letters were pitiful enough. Of course there was not a Federal postage-stamp to be had in any of the Southern States; and no matter how deeply the contents of some of these letters affected us, we could not forward them to the people they were addressed to. These letters from the South portrayed so terribly true the bitter, abject poverty of all classes, at that time, that the Northerners to whom they were written would not have hesitated to assist these friends of "better days," could they have received the letters; but, even had we been allowed to forward them, the chances were extremely slender that people were still in the same position and location after the war as before the war.